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Loving ‘Doctor Who’ Means Cheering as the Daleks Exterminate This Woke Incarnation
This weekend, Doctor Who faces a villain more destructive than the Autons, more frightening than the Weeping Angels, and more devious than Magnus Greel.
A Time Lord can survive that lot. The Woke Monster? That strikes as an insurmountable adversary.
Doctor Who, for the uninitiated, premiered in 1963, long before “woke” did — before even the widespread usage of “political correctness.” After its initial 26-year run, during which seven actors played the titular, time-and-space-traveler role in distinct ways, the BBC revived it, to great success, in 2005.
Two decades later, the show again seems on the brink of cancellation — or at least a lengthy rest. As Saturday’s season finale approaches, not the Daleks but the viewers shout, “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!”
Fewer than two million people watched the most recent episode. The penultimate episode last season attracted about double the sets of eyes. And the penultimate episode of the season before that doubled that. Notice the trend line?
Doctor Who is, yes, again a man. Fear not, progressives: last season, he kissed a man.
As Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor might say, “Oh, my word!”
Earlier this season, the Doctor journeyed to a place his companion labeled “Planet of the Incels” ruled by her mean, controlling old boyfriend. A transgender god played by drag queen Jinkx Monsoon appeared as a recent villain.
A few years ago, when the Doctor assumed a Gremlins-like creature male, a trans companion lectured: “You’re assuming ‘he’ as a pronoun?” The Doctor apologized to the creature and inquired about proper pronouns.
It’s enough to make one root for the Master.
Russell T. Davies, who created Queer as Folk, oversees Doctor Who the way that bad boyfriend oversaw the “Planet of the Incels.” He redundantly labels himself “absolutely happily left wing.” Like a dictator, he imposes these personal views on a program on public television.
“He is happier than he used to be,” Davies recently reflected about the Doctor. “He’s sadder than he used to be. He’s angry and he shows it. He’s started talking about his family, he’s just opening up a bit more.”
In other words, the Doctor is not a Time Lord but a human. He does not hail from Gallifrey but from the same urban enclaves that the program’s aggressively left-wing writers call home. He is not of the generation born 750 years ago but of the likes of AOC or any other woke Millennial.
The Narcissist Left turned Doctor Who into a show about themselves. The TARDIS is no longer a time machine but a mirror. Leftists want to look not at the alien but at their familiar reflection. They wonder why so many look away.
Surely, the original series contained occasional political themes. “The Green Death” during Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor run emphasized environmentalism. “The Sunmakers,” written by the program’s Shakespeare in Robert Holmes and starring Tom Baker of Fourth Doctor fame, appealed to the Grover Norquist demographic in its dim view of taxation and dimmer view of tax collectors. For the most part, politics stayed out.
It was a kids’ show, after all. But the adults, as they did with Halloween and comic books, commandeered Doctor Who. It strikes as profoundly creepy for a childless showrunner and a childless actor playing the titular character to champion such sexualized themes in a children’s program distributed internationally by Disney (yet another one the adults wrecked).
Certainly, Doctor Who does not arrive as the first sci-fi vehicle used to smuggle ideological concepts to the masses (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward did that in the 19th Century, after all). For this to work, story must trump agenda.
“SciFi is no different from any other medium of long-form storytelling: show, don’t tell is the primary requirement, without which little matters,” Karen Myers, the author of The Chained Adept series, tells The American Spectator.
Myers notes that a tradition of topical stories exists in science fiction and fantasy, but some writers do this better and some do this worse. Even if Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged does a whole lot of telling, she notes that it, along with Frank Herbert’s Dune, gets it right in showing. Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time does it wrong: structurally incoherent, ham-handed, and ideologically salted with modernist examples.”
Doctor Who overflows with agenda but wholly lacks subtlety. That’s a combination more catastrophic than the Master and the Nestene Consciousness.
Doctor Who’s Saturday finale may include neither cliffhanger nor regeneration. With any luck, it concludes like Newhart did, maybe with Tom Baker announcing to Louise Jameson in the TARDIS that it was all a terrible nightmare or, better yet, the way The Sopranos did by cutting to a silent, blank screen. This British institution is as dead as the foxhunt.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:
Cisgender and Latinx Democrats Agree: Ditch the Wokespeak
Political Zealotry, Like Psychopathy, Can Allow One to Murder Without Qualm
Inflation Report Has Journalists Wiping Egg Off Their Faces
The post Loving ‘Doctor Who’ Means Cheering as the Daleks Exterminate This Woke Incarnation appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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